Sign up for POLITICO Magazine's weekly email: The Friday Cover

10 People Obama Should Fire Over HealthCare.gov

By KEITH KOFFLER

November 19, 2013

President Barack Obama has gamely acknowledged that the HealthCare.gov disaster is “on me,” and surely this is one of the more accurate assertions he’s made related to his signature health care program.

Most Popular

But no president could have pulled off HealthCare.gov alone. After all, as he put it, “I don’t write code.” It truly takes a team effort to come up with something so impressively catastrophic.

Indeed, this serving of Pasta Fiasco was whipped up by a cadre of chefs, toiling together in spectacular incompetence, each doing their part to create one of the greatest flops in modern political history.

Each should be marched right out of the kitchen with alacrity. But Obama, who once said during another crisis — the 2010 Gulf oil spill — that he was searching for an “ass to kick,” hasn’t really found one this time.

And yet, with respect to the creation of HealthCare.gov, there’s really no shortage of asses. Herewith, as a service to our flummoxed commander in chief, 10 candidates for the chopping block.

1. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough

This goes without saying — and actually, that’s the only reason I can think of that no one’s saying it.

Obama claims he didn’t know how badly the website would perform. And yet, given that it had failed rudimentary tests and wasn’t even close to being ready, people in the administration had to know.

It is the White House chief of staff’s responsibility to ensure the right documents and people are getting before the president — to establish a smooth process by which the president gets the information he needs.

Obamacare is the ballgame when it comes to the Obama presidency. Ensuring it was up and running right should have been McDonough’s can’t-fail mission. According to a June 20 article in Time magazine, McDonough was supposedly spending “two hours a day” on Obamacare implementation. If that’s so, it’s inexcusable that he somehow missed that the website was months from being ready — even with the current “24/7” fix-it drive — at launch time.

If Obama requires any further reason to cashier McDonough, he need only survey the wreckage of his second-term agenda and his cratering approval ratings.

2. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

Sebelius needs to be hustled out the door without delay, and everyone in town knows it.

The White House has defended her, pointing to her earlier achievements. This is approximately like noting the sublime performances of the actor John Wilkes Booth.

Only in government would someone in a leadership position be permitted to claim they did some other good stuff after supervising an unmitigated disaster that might bring down the whole operation. One hopes Obama is only keeping her on temporarily because she knows something about how to clean up the mess.

3. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Director Marilyn Tavenner

CMS is the agency within HHS that was responsible for developing the website. In the months before the rollout, Tavenner suggested in testimony to Congress that testing of the website was on track. She is the one who signed off on the website she was overseeing.

“I want to apologize to you that the website is not working as well as it should,” Tavenner told the Ways and Means Committee last month. “I’m in charge of the program,” she said.

Enough said. Get out.

4. CMS Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao

Chao, deeply knowledgeable about the website, fretted for months about how it would perform. But he suggested to Congress things would run smoothly.

In March, he wisecracked at an insurance industry forum, “Let’s just make sure it’s not a Third World experience.”

In a July 16, 2013, email, Chao expressed concerns about the launch, writing that he needed “to feel more confident they are not going to crash the plane at take-off.”

The very next day, he testified before Congress that HealthCare.gov would be ready to launch on time.

In late September, Chao also signed off on a memo to Tavenner saying there were no significant security risks with the website. He recently claimed he was not included on a memo from CMS Chief Information Officer Tony Trenkle warning that such security risks existed.

Bye-bye.

5. CMS Chief Information Officer Tony Trenkle

Actually, Trenkle resigned and left CMS Friday to join the private sector, according to CMS. But he should have been fired instead of being allowed to quietly seek greener pastures, having supervised the dropping of fertilizer all over this one.

Trenkle’s memo on security risks shows he knew of such issues before the website launched. What he did about it is unclear.

But, whatever — he was in charge of IT at the agency that put together the world’s most famous technological boondoggle. He needed to be denied the “spend more time with my family” excuse and fired instead.

6. White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park

Where was he?

Park reportedly was not heavily involved in the latter stages of the website’s development. Is that really the case?

But if not, why not? If you were the president, wouldn’t you expect your chief tech guy to be all over your most important technological project, reporting back to you on progress and running the traps to make sure everything was going smoothly? Park must go.

7. White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri

In this crisis, as it did with the Benghazi videotape fairy tale, the White House started running at the mouth before it had any idea what was happening.

The communications on the website debacle have been abysmal. Remember how Obama took to the Rose Garden on Oct. 1 and proclaimed the website was suffering a bad case of the “glitches” and compared it to Apple rolling out “a new mobile operating system”? Or his absurd appearance in the same spot three weeks later, hawking call-center phone numbers like some 2 a.m. infomercial host?

Moreover, Obama’s explanations of his false promise — “If you like your plan, you can keep it” — featured the hideously inaccurate assertion that he had said he was referring only to plans in existence before Obamacare was signed.

The boss has been made to look like a fool too many times.

8. Jeffrey Zients

Zients is in charge of HealthCare.gov CPR. “By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” he said in October. That sounded like just about everybody could use it — pretty much fixed. But now we’re talking four out of five users. And there are growing indications that even 80 percent might be ambitious.

If the latest Obamacare promise doesn’t pan out, its deliverer, Zients, should be fired from his ad hoc post as chairman of the Department of Website Surgery, and Obama should consider preventing him from becoming National Economic Council director as scheduled Jan. 1. The clock is ticking, Jeff.

9. White House health policy adviser Jeanne Lambrew

Was Obama’s White House health care guru in some kind of trance?

Few if any in the White House have had more to do with implementing Obamacare or understand it better than Lambrew. Did she fail to ensure that the requirements for the Obamacare website were understood and heeded by the techies? As the former director of the now-defunct HHS Office of Health Reform, Lambrew presumably had extensive contacts at HHS to ensure things were going smoothly and if not, to sound the alarm at the White House. She apparently didn’t. Clean out your desk.

During his opening remarks at a Nov. 13 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, Baitman seemed to place responsibility for HealthCare.gov squarely on CMS while taking credit for a list of exciting achievements at HHS, prompting panel Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to cut him off, dryly remarking, “Mr. Baitman, we know how great a job you’re doing — that’s why you’re here today. Could you please wrap up?”

According to his HHS bio, Baitman’s “emphasis is on delivering improved business outcomes from the agency’s IT investments.”

Is that so? HealthCare.gov was the agency’s top tech project. Why wasn’t he on top of this?

Why wasn’t anybody?

Keith Koffler, who covered the White House as a reporter for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the blog White House Dossier.